Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson, is a British-American spaceflight company focused on providing suborbital spaceflights to space tourists and researchers. As the world's first commercial spaceline, it develops and operates its own reusable spaceflight systems, including the SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo. While the company is shifting its focus to Delta class vehicles for commercial service in 2026, its current partners include Redwire for manufacturing research payload lockers and it operates from Spaceport America in New Mexico.
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If the 2018-12-13 test flight is successful, Virgin Galactic plans to move ahead with full-duration SpaceShipTwo motor burns of about 60 seconds.
Virgin Galactic uses the 50-mile (approximately 80-kilometer) altitude, the threshold used by NASA and the U.S. Air Force for awarding astronaut wings, as a major milestone for determining that the vehicle has reached space.
Virgin Galactic plans to perform the next powered test flight of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane as soon as 2018-12-13 from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.
Virgin Group announced a non-binding memorandum of understanding nearly a year ago with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia for a $1,000,000,000 investment that would be allocated to Virgin Galactic, The Spaceship Company, and Virgin Orbit.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Virgin’s space companies reached an initial agreement in October for a $1,000,000,000 investment in Virgin’s space companies, which include Virgin Orbit, Virgin Galactic, and The Spaceship Company.
Tim Buzza left Virgin Orbit in May after four years working at Virgin Orbit and Virgin Galactic since Virgin Orbit was spun out in 2017.
Through Venture Class Launch Services, NASA awarded contracts in 2015 to send cubesats into orbit with Rocket Lab, Virgin Galactic, and Firefly Space Systems.
Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit announced a set of agreements on 2018-07-06 with Italian companies and the Italian Space Agency that could lead to suborbital and orbital launches from a proposed Italian spaceport.
Virgin Galactic signed a letter of intent with the Italian Space Agency to perform a dedicated SpaceShipTwo research flight from Spaceport America in New Mexico in 2019 that includes training of an Italian payload specialist.
Altec is a joint venture of the Italian Space Agency and Thales Alenia Space that signed a memorandum of understanding with Virgin Galactic in 2016 about performing flights from Italy.
The Italian Space Agency signed a joint declaration with Virgin Galactic about future suborbital research flights using SpaceShipTwo that could be flown from Italy and identified a first research flight from New Mexico scheduled for no earlier than September 2019.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane VSS Unity performed a successful test flight on 2018-05-29.
Virgin Galactic spun off Virgin Orbit in March 2017.